Nordstrom Beautycycle Program Has Officially Launched in Canada

It’s about to get a lot easier to recycle your beauty products in Canada thanks to the Nordstrom Beautycycle program.

Starting today, the retailer will accept empty beauty product packaging, regardless of brand, at any Nordstrom Canada store. The goal is make sure that hard-to-recycle packaging isn’t sent straight to landfill. (Of 120 billion units of plastic packaging produced globally by the beauty industry, less than a mere nine percent is actually recycled.)

The move makes Nordstrom — which first launched the program stateside last year — the first major retailer in Canada to offer a catch-all beauty-focused recycling program.

So how does it work?

In Nordstrom beauty departments nation wide, customers will find TerraCycle Zero Waste boxes where you can simply drop off your empties. Once full, the contents will be sent off to the the recycling company to properly be cleaned, sorted and recycled.

Most packaging is accepted by the Nordstrom Beautycycle initiative, but there are some limitations. Shampoo and conditioner bottles and caps, lip balm tubes, lotion bottles and dispensers, and mascara tubes, for example, are all okay, while items like aerosol cans, perfume bottles and nail polish packaging cannot be recycled through the program.

Nordstrom set a sustainable goal of its own through the program. By 2025, the brand aims to take back 100 tons of beauty packaging. This is on top of the retailer’s previous sustainability objectives, including committing to, among other things, reducing single-use plastic by 50 percent and ensure that 15 percent of all of its products are sustainable.